In the previous post, I was disappointed with the CMANO scenario I played. It was too hard for me, yes, but I also didn’t feel like I was learning anything by playing it.

This time I tried the scenario Deter, Detect, Defend, which takes place in 1962. I also got completely destroyed by it (the game said it was a disaster), but in this case it was a fun experience. Why the difference?

This scenario places you in command of NORAD Region 25, headquartered at McChord AFB near Tacoma WA. You’re charged with the defense of the major metropolitan areas of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. With several different types of fighter planes and interceptors (along with batteries of Nike Hercules Surface-to-Air missiles) you must stop what the Soviets have in store for your zone. It is a kind of slow-motion, low-tech Missile Command.

Part of the challenge is that the scenario poses that the nuclear war has escalated so suddenly, you start out on peacetime alert. You must make your initial defense with what is ready at the moment, rather than the full complement of forces.

I have my fighters up, and I’ve been alerted to some suspicious formations headed for Seattle. Smoke ’em?

This scenario is rated as more towards the easy side. If it weren’t for the low alert, the player would have more than enough interceptors to do everything he needs to do and more. What makes the scenario a bit challenging are a couple of surprises hidden away in it. Likely, reading through this, you’ll discover those surprises, which may ruin this scenario if you’re thinking of playing it. Consider yourself forewarned.

Even on easy, as I said above, I lost miserably. In stark contrast to the previous scenario, it is easy to tell why I lost and what needs to be done differently to not lose. Basically, there are a few incoming flights that, if you don’t have fighters in the air and covering the correct sector, you won’t have time to intercept them. Until they were on top of me, I did not realize that their direction was one of the approaches for the enemy.

For some reason, getting Vancouver nuked loses you the game. Hey, I didn’t lose any American cities! Shouldn’t that be a minor victory? (Just kidding, Canadian readers).

Whoops. Didn’t United Airlines tell their pilots that there is a war on. Good thing I didn’t just blindly start taking out everything coming in from the East.

What’s fun about this scenario is not just that it is tense without being overwhelmingly difficult. It is also the array of weaponry you have at your disposal (and facing off against you.). The way the scenario starts, with your bases not being on alert, means your initial task is to chose the loadouts for your idle and reserve aircraft.

Some choice it is.

In this confrontation we ,the players, have at our disposal the latest in air-to-air missiles (AIM-4 Falcon) as well as a few exotic beasts. There is the AIR-2 Genie (sometimes called the Ding-Dong), a nuclear-tipped air-to-air missile. I guess that’s one way to be really, really sure you get the kill. You’ve also got your Folding-Fin Aerial Rocket Mk 4, aka Mighty Mouse. This rocket, designed for bomber intercept missions, was modeled after German WWII systems successfully used against American Bombers and intended to compensate for the extreme high speeds of intercept. Sadly, it wasn’t very effective. While the rockets’ detonation could do plenty of damage, accuracy was a problem. I wanted to give them a try, but never got the chance.

Caught with my pants down. Those little red specks over Vancouver and points south are nukes. I’ve got a pair of Delta Daggers on afterburner headed for intercept, but they didn’t make it in time.

Boom.

Carrying these instruments of the Atomic Age are an array of interceptor planes whose names are scarcely remembered. The F-102 Delta Dart, F-106 Delta Dart, and F-101 Voodoo were, at the time, the top of line. They came as part of the rapid innovation that occurred prior to the Vietnam War. In a few years, we will see technology start to settle into much longer development and operational times. Once you know a country’s platforms, you won’t need to know the exact year. But up through the early sixties, it sometimes could feel like a free-for-all.

When I was a little kid, I had a sticker book for aircraft. It took me from the first aircraft and the First World War up through “modern” designs, which in this case happened to be the early 1960s. It was not just warplanes; there was also an emphasis on some of the experimental planes pushing the speed and altitude records at the time. I can still recall the fascination with the shiny , futuristic jet designs with their exotic-sounding names. For the imaginative, this may have been the height of the “jet age,” or the “atomic age,” or whatever description captures the cusp-of-the-future state of technology of that time.

Ground batteries are locked on to the incoming cruise missiles. Now we wait to see which side’s systems actually work.

I am ignoring, in my narrative, the enemy’s technology. During play, you don’t get the focus of the details of the other side as you do on your own equipment. The fog of war often hides the opponent, eluding precise identification. Coming at us, we see a range of bombers carry nukes as well as cruise missiles, presenting an equally appealing view into the other side of the arms race.

One thing to remember, and it is highlighted in the scenario notes, this situation is all-but-impossible. The politics of the 1960s focused on the Bomber Gap and this beautiful array of American weaponry was likely made available as a result of this fear. But the fact is, well before this hypothetical attack took place, the upper echelons of command were aware of what the world now knows. It was the U.S. that had the vast superiority in terms of strategic resources. The USSR simply didn’t have the capability of launching a massive first strike in 1962, particularly not of the sort depicted here.

So we are left with a simple and fun scenario for playing some global thermonuclear war to pass the time. No complaints here.

This is a Part 1 of a three part post. Click to jump ahead to Part 2 or Part 3.

Fifteen years on, the Cold War looked very different that it did at its start. Initially, while the United States assumed the Soviets had the largest and most powerful army on the planet, the Russians themselves knew that wasn’t so. The Kremlin may well have had a desire to project power globally, but they lacked the resources to do so. Recovery from the Second World War was a huge task, and Stalin knew he did not want to take on the West.

By the early 1960s, the Soviet Union seemed to be much more aggressive internationally, even if it was more bluster than action. Khrushchev emphasized his (largely illusionary) arsenal of ICBM missiles in combination with their early “space race” advances in an effort to force the United States into a negotiation position. For the public, it was seen as a threat of Russian superiority in an eminent World War III requiring rapid advancement in weapons capabilities. The shooting down of Gary Power’s U2 and then the confrontations in Berlin indicated a willingness of the USSR to resort to military force. In May of 1960, the Soviet Union established relations with the communist government in Cuba. The governments of China and Cuba also extended their reach into promoting communist revolution across the globe, leaving the United States with what appeared to be an ever-growing enemy.

Within this context, I am revisiting my look at the Cold War from a strategic level. Before, I looked at the board gameTwilight Struggle. This time, I want to focus on computer treatments of the period and I’ll start with the scenarios available for Civilization IV.

Civilization, at its most basic, takes you from the founding of civilization, through today, and beyond. As such, it is bound to pass through the Atomic Era and the post-World War II technologies. Naturally, it is neither particularly suited as a representation of that time nor is it in any way a given that you’ll end up with a binary confrontation between superpowers when that time comes. As the Civilization franchise has evolved, however, the ability to create scenarios with their own special units and technology trees adds the ability to focus on specific eras, perhaps bringing some unique insights to the game as a historical tool.

The Mexican drug lords have been causing chaos in Texas. Time to send in the troops to bring order to the southern border.

Within Civilization IV, mod-maker MaxRiga put considerable effort into a series of modern mods, specifically targeting on 1901, 1941, 1961, and 2001. There are two scenarios created for the 1961 start, differing in the number of starting civilizations. I decided to start slow and went with the lower number of opponents and an easier setting. I also played as the United States, who starts the game pretty much on top of the world.

I also tried to, at least as far as is possible, funnel my play into the terms of history and interpret what I’m seeing likewise. Of course, this is Civilization. So divisions of Mexicans coming up over the Rio Grande was met with an occupation of both Mexico and Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was seizing smaller, independent African countries.

Civilization isn’t a political and economic simulator, even in so much as it has any realism. So eventually the Cold War is bound to become a hot one, otherwise its going to be a long, boring couple of decades of clicking “End Turn.” In my first game, it was some kind of Suez Crisis type indecent that pushed the world over the brink. Egypt and NATO got into a shooting war. While the United States was able to distance herself from that one, the it was the start of the domino effect. By 1968, I was sucked into a Vietnam-style war in Argentina. Well, not quite. I smoked ’em in about a year and a half.

High tensions in the Cold War. NATO and the Warsaw Pact glare at each other across the Iron Curtain.

While asymmetric wars with third-world countries abound, a true Cold War situation prevails in Europe. (I think) it is a side-effect of Civilization mechanics, rather than anything too particular about the scenario or the mod. The Soviets have declared war on NATO. However, the border between the two remains rather calm. What I think is happening is, on the outbreak of war, I moved troops into Western Europe, augmenting what the scenario already stationed there. Because the NATO border cities are garrisoned with U.S. troops, it appears the Ruskies can’t make a move without declaring war on the United States. Like the real 1968, proxy wars are one thing, but the Kremlin doesn’t really want full-on war with the Americans.

So each turn has become a tense affair. Is this the turn that the USSR will hit me with a surprise attack? Will they find a hole in the NATO armor, forcing me to intervene? Am I going to regret diverting all those resources to South America? For a fairly one-dimensional simulation, it actually serves up an interesting parallel of the Cold War. Of course, it can’t hurt that I’m deliberately interpreting everything that happens in that light.

Of course, when it comes down to it, it is still Civilization. When the wars do come about, it is a matter of stacking units in adjacent squares and trying to knock each other down. Rinse and repeat for each city until you get tired of warring. Again, you can try to stretch it into a plausible scenario. For example, I had forgotten how resistant cities were to permanent occupation in Civilization IV due to culture. When the war (above) eventually turned hot, I was able to grab Cuba, Poland, Kiev, Leningrad (NATO took this one), and Moscow before I called it a day. I also took Rostov, which oddly enough is located where Sevastopol should be. While holding on to Cuba was doable, Kiev and Moscow both had to be reverted to the Russians. Poland, now liberated, joined with NATO. Rostov (not Rostov) turned Islamic and joined the Caliphate. All-in-all a better (from the standpoint of the story) outcome than I would have hoped for.

The mod obviously was a lot of effort. There are some oddities, many caused by the Civilization IV palette itself, but others integral to the scenario/mod design. The tech tree gets a little unwieldy, with the U.S. getting a bunch of WWI era units (and German ones at that) when resources get a little thin. The deeper, Cold-War-themed tech tree adds some nice chrome, but it sometimes seems a bit unwieldy. Particularly if you want to stick to the historical theme. I would like to engage in the Space Race starting in the 1960s, but the mechanics seem to make that prohibitive.

An army-group strength cohort of Navy Seals was representing something for the scenario design, but I’m not sure what. My Apache gunship can really slaughter me some commies in 1968-9, having been an initial placement in the scenario. The new units’ graphics can vary from a pretty nice add to the South Park-y “Modern Infantry.”

The biggest gap, to me, is the absence of nuclear weapons. An inverse missile gap, if you will. Nuclear bombs and their delivery systems would seem to me to be a defining feature for a Cold War game. The presence of a nuclear deterrent also should have kept me from (as I did) rolling through Western Russia in 1969 and completely eliminating the Red Chinese in 1975. One well placed nuke could completely neutralize my forces, but nobody has any nukes. I poured some research into the Manhattan Project and had, at least theoretically, some atomic capability by 1970, but nobody else did, and throughout the 1970s it does not appear that anyone has built a functioning bomb. A Cold War without an Arms Race? Why bother?

Now, Civilization IV is addictive as it ever was. So there is that. Think of it not as a Cold War game, using Civilization as the programming medium. Think of it as a Civilization game with some Cold War chrome. At the latter it is successful.

I’ve not delved too deeply into Civilization V and the modding capabilities, and I haven’t even taken a first glance at Civilization VI (V is hard enough on my graphics card). Civilization IV, with the expansions in place, seem to be the golden age for mods and user-made scenarios. If support for that really has been weakened in the new versions, it is a shame.

Can’t Take Me Home

Following a number of mods, the maker of the Cold War scenario formed his own company and set out to make a Cold War game from the ground up.

I first looked into this game a couple of years ago, when I first started writing about wargames. I was noticing the absence of strategic level Cold War games but came across his website through the above Civilization mods. At the time, the game The Cold War Era was only available as a download from the website. The download options included both a pay version and a demo.

The demo itself was well conceived. In single-player mode, the game is limited to 10 years of play (1950-1959). When playing multiplayer, the most permissive of the two installations prevails. In other words, if you download the “limited” version, but want to play against someone who has the full, paid-for version, you can play the entire game, unrestricted, in multiplayer.

The game itself gets less praise from me.

As I’ve said before, it pains me to be too harsh. This is not a product from some big game company, but from a fellow player and enthusiast who is trying to create games for which he sees a need. In this case, however, he has made a product which he is selling, and so while it may not be fair to compare it to triple-A titles, it is reasonable to compare to other products in the same price range.

The game is a continuous time, grand strategy treatment of the period from 1950 through to (I think) 2000. While it can be paused (and you can still do everything while paused) in single-player mode, when playing multiplayer there is no pausing. At least in the version I have, there is also no saving. So if you are going to play, you had better be prepared to play straight through.

Two months before the demo-version times out, and I am about to lose. I don’t always know why I lose, I just know that I always do. This was the only game I’ve played that featured armed revolution in West Germany.

Graphics are simple but functional. The user-interface, however, feels less than functional.

The game is a simple one. The world is divided into countries/regions, each of which are either pro-U.S., pro-Soviet, or neutral. Every one of these countries has three areas that you can influence. One is called Influence, and represents the relative domination of the superpowers within the internal politics of that nation. The second is the military, which has the government forces versus insurgent forces. The third is espionage. Having espionage within a nation allows two other options to either enhance or undermine the stability of that country. Each month, you are able to add influence to any nation on earth in one of these three areas (subject to a couple of caveats), up to the ability of your budget to support it. And that is the entire game. Click, click, click, and then wait for the clock to tick forward (or tick, tick, tick in the case of the actions that take 3 months).

There is more to it. Some of it obvious and some of it under-the-hood. The user manual is, well, let’s just call it a work in progress. For example, it describes the conditions in which “revolution” can be launched, but says nothing about what happens from there. From play, it is clear that an armed revolution prevails when it is unopposed by military forces from the other side. I think. But nothing is said about how military forces are eliminated. One assumes there is some additional random function which uses the relative strengths of the military, but who really can tell?

The user-interface feels patched on to the top of this “real-time spreadsheet” model, as opposed to being designed to present the best gaming experience. It’s not the worst design I’ve seen, but it means the game becomes less one of strategy than a challenge to see if you can keep track of all the moving parts within an interface that doesn’t necessarily highlight them. Winning likely involves being able to click away on a country that your opponent isn’t paying any attention to. Of course, playing single-player can eliminate the frantic feel of the game – I have been playing by pausing at every month to review all of the “hot spots” one-by-one.

Now the biggest caveat in all of this is that I am playing the demo version. The demo version is restricted to a 10-year period up until 1960, but it also seems set up to be nearly unwinnable. Unlike what I think is the normal scenario start, where the two superpower budgets are equal, the demo starts with the player having vastly inferior monetary resources. Add to that, it might be impossible to “win” given only 10 years in which to collect whatever points contribute to that win (again, not explained in the manual). It seems all kind of pointless.

And yet, there is some actual strategy in it. The basic move seems to be to identify neutral countries where you can slowly build support and stoke opposition to that neutral government, and thus be able to flip the government to your side. But the revolution option is a kind of a wild card in this pure-numbers strategy. Winning an armed revolt means flipping all the “opposition” into government, which can suddenly turn a battleground country into a solid lock for one of the superpowers. Within the plan to gain control, you also have to be budgeting for defensive moves as well as advancing along the tech track (Space Race in the basic game, but more to follow). Nothing will ruin your day like discovering that the opponent is about to execute a decisive move, but realizing you don’t have the budget to counter it.

Since I downloaded the demo, it no longer seems to be an option. The Cold War Era has moved its distribution to Steam, and advanced a few version iterations beyond what I have played. The company has also released a sequel, Arms Race – TCWE. The original game now sells for $4.99 and the sequel for $14.99 (the same price as Twilight Struggle, I might point out). The sequel appears to be more of the same, but with better graphics, deeper gameplay, and more bells and whistles. Let’s just say that the cost/benefit hasn’t yet tempted me to buy in at this point.

Another way to look at The Cold War Era is to think of it as a real-time simplification of Twilight Struggle. I say this, because as I was programming my Twilight Struggle opponent, I was thinking of the viability of just such a game. Gone are the Event Cards of Twilight Struggle, and you are left with simply placing Operations Points as a way to vie for control across the Cold War landscape. I think the idea is sound, but I’m not sure the real-time implementation of it actually works.

Sometimes I Feel So Cold

So if Twilight Struggle remains the standard, lets return to that.

My own programmed AI is theoretically capable of making it through an entire game, yet practically speaking, I’m usually met with a thrown exception rather than a victory. It also isn’t that good at winning, although it is good at matching the arc of game play to the historical timeline without being entirely stupid.

Much of what I’ve speculated upon before purchasing the game has been confirmed now that I’ve played it. The computer opponent is aggressive and challenging and it takes a decent player to beat it. Out the window are any concerns about how the play might conform or deviate from the course of history and, instead, you must concentrate on maximizing your cards’ value within the rules. Well into a game, I’m not sure I even know what countries are controlled or not. Instead, I focus on scanning the board for battleground states with the right combination of own-side and enemy control markers.

Of course, this isn’t a criticism of the computer version. As I said, this stems from the game design and the same would be said about a tabletop game between two competent players. To the contrary, the fact that the computer AI takes the role of “competent player” rather than the more haphazard, exception-throwing personality of my own model is an indication that the programmed opponent has been well done.

As the U.S., I’m attempting to draw Egypt into the North Yemen Civil War in an effort to destabilize the Nasser government and reduce Soviet influence. It didn’t work.

It is also a well done game all around. It’s an attractive interface that straddles the potentially conflicting needs of looking good on the computer while preserving everything about the board game. The controls work well and are easy enough to be intuitive. I’ve yet to see any crashes, glitches, or bugs. The game is designed to play either against the computer or against another player. I will think more often than not, playing against a friend on the computer would be a nice way to save the trouble of dealing with all the little pieces and such. Especially if you want to split the game over multiple sections, and you have cats, children, or a small apartment to deal with.

In addition to not having to deal with all the bits and pieces, the player no longer has to do so much math.

Back when, when I first bought the game, I played a couple of times and lost every game. The computer was clearly able to keep more balls in the air than I could, and while I fought him on one front, he finds a continent that I’m not working on to put a solid hold on. I intended to write this article explaining how I was unable to beat the AI.

It was a bit of an embarrassing position to be in. Shortly after I bought the game, I was telling another gamer (of both computer and board games) about my purchase and he said something to the effect of , “yeah, that’s a good little game. I like to use it as training tool to prepare for board game nights.” Similar conversation has surrounded the game since it was first obvious that a computer version was coming out – that the audience was going to be the tabletop player who wanted a fix between opponents. To find that the game was too good for me to play against, well that is kind of embarrassing.

So I picked the game up again before I started writing so it will all be fresh in my mind, and I actually won my first game (both first game this year and first game I won). This win came despite being a little rusty with the rules. So I guess the AI isn’t the master that I’d assumed before. But though I am winning, the games are tense affairs with everything I do seeming to be critical. The game has a setting to handicap the game one way or the other, but I’m not entirely sure how that works or how effective it would be once one can reliably beat the AI.

While it’s nice to have some options for the cold war conflict on a strategic level, what I don’t feel here is a sense of the early 1960s. The Berlin Wall, The Bay of Pigs, Gary Powers U2 downing, Kennedy’s announcement of the Moon race, and the Tsar Bomba all hit the public consciousness in a matter of a year or two. So while strategically, we can’t really capture the spirit of the time, perhaps we can do better with some specific, nuclear-themed scenarios from CMANO.

Many, many (many) years ago, I started a personal project coding a computer opponent for the game Twilight Struggle.

Twilight Struggle is a top selling and top-ranked board game covering the span of the Cold War. It is in its 8th printing, an evolution that has involved several significant facelifts. It has also been part of the inspiration for the game Labyrinth by designer Volko Ruhnke, also from publisher GMT, which uses many of same mechanisms as Twilight Struggle. That in turn has lead to a Counterinsurgency (COIN) series of games from GMT.

While I began programing my game years ago, I had only got so far into it before my interest moved on to other things. It wasn’t until some months ago, when I was again thinking about Cold War era gaming, that I decided to dig out my old project.

With my second push, I’ve managed to get a game engine that can play through from start to finish, handling the majority of the rules. I have developed a programmed opponent for both sides – in fact, a necessity because testing manually would just be too tedious. I need to be able to run through the game Computer versus Computer for testing purposes. The “AI,” if you can call it that, is pretty rudimentary. I actually have programed two. One makes decisions mostly randomly. The computer knows what it must do and, occasionally, what it should do; but randomly selects from the options available to it. The second opponent uses a combination of history and the scoring system to focus play on particular countries or regions. The two are roughly on the same level as each other, which should tell me something. Perhaps sometimes being “random,” doing the unexpected for no particular reason, can pay off. Sometimes you get lucky and “anticipate” something that no amount of logic could have foreseen.

Programming logic for the game has made me think a lot of about it. Certainly more than I would occasionally getting out the board and playing. For one, I think I understand its popularity.

There is trite phrase used so often in gaming and it’s one I just cannot stand. “Easy to learn but hard to master.” It might be easier to count the number of game reviews or marketing pitches without the phrase, rather than those with it. Nonetheless, I think a large part of what makes this game so popular is the different levels at which in can be enjoyed.

If two game players, guys who had never seen the game before, bought this game and took it home, they could probably read through the rules in the afternoon and play through the game that night. I suspect that game would be a fully satisfying one. The rules are not that long, and there is a fairly limited number of choices you have during your turn. Most of the complexity is involved in playing the events on cards (see inset), where the gameplay is detailed on the card being played (generally not requiring remembering or referring to complex rules). Furthermore, that first game would give the players the feel of reliving the Cold War.

Of course, that probably would only work with two first-time players. A first time player against an experienced player would be almost certain to lose. As you grow in your knowledge of the game, you realize that some cards can be played in combination for far more effect than their individual worth. A truly advanced player has in his head an idea of all the available cards and how they interact. The playing of one card may depend not only on the other visible cards, but knowing what cards are still in the deck versus what cards have already been played, all (of course) with an eye on the current positions on the game board. Thus, players with hundreds of games behind them can compete in tournaments with an entirely different style of gameplay than that original game.

I’ll come back to this point, but I suspect that tournament game has far, far less feeling of reliving the Cold War than the first game between two novices.

As I said, in programming opponents, I created a game where two computer opponents played each other. The first game, where the code was stable enough to actually play through for a bit without crashing, ended in a nuclear war in the mid-50s. The problem was my computer players were not programmed to avoid the bomb, so they just went ahead and pushed each other’s buttons until – BOOM. I wonder how many first-time players have ended their own games with a sudden, unexpected nuclear war because they didn’t realize the kinds of traps to avoid? No doubt a few.

Twilight Struggle in 30 seconds.

Twilight Struggle is a board game with a card mechanic that drives most of the game play. Players compete for control of the world as either the U.S. or the Soviet Union during the period of the cold war. Play takes place over a series of 10 turns, each of which involves playing a hand of cards randomly drawn from the deck. Cards can be played for their points or for the historical events that they describe. Some cards trigger a tallying of score. Players win by dominating the score (scoring 20 points more than their opponent) or dominating all of Europe. However, a player will lose if he starts a nuclear war.

The designers notes were an interesting read. I re-read them as I picked back up my project. A few things from them stuck with me.

First, the designer points out that Twilight Struggle is not meant to be a simulation of the Cold War, it is a game. While there is plenty of historic content in the design, where a decision had to be made between playability and “accuracy,” playability always won.

One you get past that initial familiarization period, I think the “game” part would start to heavily overshadow the “history” part. Veteran players have conversations about the necessity of “spacing” a “DEFCON suicide card.” I doubt Kennedy had those kinds of conversations with his advisors.

As part of the explanation of how the game deviates from “reality,” the designer hits on something that may be far more important to “historical” gaming than he realizes. He explains that the game implements and rewards, not the world as it was, but the world as we thought it was at the time. Or in his words, the game “accepts all of the internal logic of the Cold War as true—even those parts of it that are demonstrably false.”

I’m thinking this concept may be critical to the both the playability and enjoyability of many historical games.

Sometimes, as I read historical accounts of battles it seems that victory goes to the side who has screwed up the least. While both sides make major mis-estimations, mistakes and blunders, when one can commit a few fewer errors, it gains them the day. Hindsight can avoid those critical errors. And while part of replaying a famous battle is exploring the “what if” that might have changed the course of the battle or the war. On the other hand, if all players knew then what we know now, historical battles would rarely resemble history.

World War II, the favorite for wargames, should probably never have happened at all. Czechoslovakia had an army to rival Germany’s both in manpower and technology, especially once you consider what Germany had committed to the defense of other fronts. Had the French and British simply allowed the Czech’s to defend their own country, perhaps with a threat of French invasion on Germany’s western border, the war would have been over before it ever started. Nobody can play a grand-strategic treatment of the second world war and not see how vulnerable Germany is to early allied intervention.

So a game that can enforce the outcomes, not that we know should have happened, but that everyone knew at the time must happen, should provide a more historical and probably more challenging and engaging gameplay. This wouldn’t apply to all games or all genre’s, but I’m sure it has plenty of uses. The example given in Twilight Struggle is the way that the “domino theory” is enforced through gameplay, in a way that is not supported by scholarly analysis of the military and political situation of the Cold War.

Also in his introduction, the designer pays homage to the Chris Crawford computer game Balance of Power. Those old enough to remember playing the game probably remember it as the first and, thus, the definitive treatment of Cold War gaming. Among the features that stick in one’s mind is something referenced in the Twilight Struggle manual as well as in other articles throughout the years. In Crawford’s game, starting a nuclear war is an instant loss. The end-game message sternly admonishes the player for expecting a rewarding display of fireworks composed of mushroom clouds (I’ve got Missile Command in my mind’s eye) for essentially destroying humanity. We are now better than our cold-warrior ancestors, who risked the future for the sake of the egos and some politics.

What got me in this: While Crawford’s game was used as the inspiration for the Twilight Struggle’s mechanic that turning the cold war hot ends the game, it is not as simple as the instant defeat. The loss goes to the player that causes the nuclear war. Meaning that forcing your opponent to start a nuclear war is actually a win!

It makes me wonder, given Crawford’s original tone, what are the implications of such a victory. Does it say it is OK to annihilate the human race as long as you make it look like someone else did it? Or should one read more complexity into the “simulation.” Perhaps a “DEFCON” victory (in the terminology of the game) actually should imply entering into one of the World War III scenarios from a position of strength. Perhaps the winner is the one that can keep a NATO/Warsaw Pact showdown non-nuclear. Or perhaps winning means having overwhelmingly superior technology or numbers so as to win a nuclear face off. Or maybe it does mean achieving that first strike victory and a decisive advantage in offsetting megadeaths.

Or is this an excellent example of where the gameplay takes precedence over historicity or simulation. It is a nifty gameplay mechanic. No matter if you are behind in every single measure of the game, even if you are one card-play away from losing on points, if you can attempt (attempt, mind you, you need not succeed) a coup in a “battleground” country during the opponent’s turn while DEFCON is a 2, you win. Instantly.

Speaking of Crawford’s game, while this is largely a review of the Twilight Struggle board game design, the post is ostensibly about a computer version of the game that I may or may not ever finish. Others have been working on computer versions of this game longer than I have, perhaps even officially. Within the last year or so, a computer version of the game has been released. While it is available for a fairly modest price ($14.99 on Steam as I write this), I have not yet purchased it. I decided what I really wanted to do was think about the game, not necessarily play it. In fact, given how expert play can be decidedly anti-historic, I don’t think I want the distraction of trying to win the game to take away from my enjoyment of the game.

So, for now, I’ll watch my two clueless AI’s face off against each other again, and again, and again, until they can enjoy a bug-free world.

My first post about the Cold War is about making the transition from WWII wargaming, where there is a multitude of treatments for most every part of the war, to the Cold War where, well, there isn’t. The post going to be divided into two parts, because the two games I kick of the Cold War with are not really related, except by starting date.

The Operational Art of War, Volume III

Twilight Struggle

The greatest battle of the Cold War is the one that never happened.

While the Cold War ultimately touched nearly every corner of the globe and involved some decidedly “hot” fighting, preparations were for the massive showdown between West and East in Germany. Initial confrontations of the era took place across borders created by the position of troops at the end of the Second World War.

No border was more important than the division between the Western and Soviet occupied zones in Germany. Initially, the powers agreed that the goal was to prevent Germany from ever again amassing the power to start a World War. The unity of effort began to dissolve when the West saw that their policies were driving the population to Communism. While the original plan was a political reunification of Germany, it was clear that the West and the Soviets had very different concepts of what that unified Germany would look like. As tensions rose and the border between the occupations zones became the border between the world’s two great ideologies, a political reunification became impossible and a military unification seemed more and more likely.

For the next forty years, the powers prepared for battle between the Soviet Union and the West in Germany. Preparations for that battle determined the outcome of conflicts elsewhere in the globe, and vice versa. While wargames can be, and of course are, made about the various proxy wars, police actions, and revolutions that took place in lieu of that battle, the armchair commander will always long to command the full power of NATO or the Warsaw Pact in virtual battle.

My first game is a an Operational Art of War scenario that puts this battle into perhaps its earliest possible spot in the timeline. What if, as the U.S. and Soviet Russia squeezed the remnants of Nazi Germany between them, the ideological conflict between East and West turned immediately hot?

The Scenario is Patton 45, a scenario which shipped with the original The Operational Art of War: Volume I in 1998 (and was subtitled “Patton’s Nightmare” in that version). It was designed by Doug Bevard to model a Soviet Offensive against Patton’s 3rd Army in Czechoslovakia.

The last Soviet Offensive of World War II was the drive to “liberate” Prague from the German Army. Hostilities lasted beyond the cease-fire in Berlin as jockeying for position in the new order of the Cold War began.

The Scenario starts with the very real tension which mounted in the final weeks of World War II as both the Soviets and the West attempted to control territory before the Germany’s surrender.The final major offensive of the war took place in Czechoslovakia, as the Soviets sought to force the surrender of Germany Army Group Center and seize Prague. While the Americans had agreed on a demarcation line between U.S. and Soviet operations, the Czech army itself rose up against the Germans and threatened the possibility that they would defeat the Germans, possibly with American assistance. For the Germans themselves, there were many that were fighting their way Westward, preferring to surrender to the U.S. rather than the Soviets. Stalin forced a rapid attack, at significant human cost to the Soviet army, to insure that that post-war Prague was in Soviet hands.

The Scenario is based on negotiations taking place before the final creation of German Occupation zones at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. According the the scenario notes, a British negotiator suggested that the rebuilding of liberated Czechoslovakia should take place under the oversight of the West. In response, the Soviet negotiators not only rejected a loss of influence in Czechoslovakia, but demanded control over Southern Germany as well. While apparently this discussion never went any further than that, the scenario hypotheses an alternate reality where the Soviets insisted on their position and, when further rebuked by the West, launch an offensive against the unprepared American army to physically occupy the ground.

In my opinion, the American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms, whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.

General George S. Patton, Jr. – May, 1945

The Operational Art of War (TOAW) is a game that I will certainly be coming back to. Originally released in 1998, it is currently being modified for a “Version 4” release. The current version is TOAW 3, which was released in 2006.

At the time the game came out, it was a major game release with top-shelf billing at many of the retailers of its day. Going from my own memory of my impressions at the time, I recall three unique features.

It was a system capable of simulating virtually any battle from the World War I era to current events and beyond. The game released with scenarios spanning this range, but the system was also open to user-developed scenarios covering any battle or timeframe of interest. (I’m not sure if there is a definitive user-made scenario count, but I expect it is in the range of 1000 or higher)

The focus was on simulating the operational aspects of battles. Perhaps novel at the time (although fairly common today) was the emphasis on things like supply, as opposed to simply movement and combat.

The combat factors were derived from the ground up, by modelling the individual units, weapons, and vehicles. This was intended to give a level of fidelity, particularly when modeling hypothetical scenarios, that simply assigning relative combat factors might not. In this, it still retains its novelty.

There are a lot of factors with this gaming system and the scenarios I’d like to discuss. How suitable is the hex-and-counter model for maneuver, when tactical factors are not present? (Compare, for instance, to games which use area movement). But for this post, my main focus is going to be on the difficulty of modelling a hypothetical situation like this. One where not only did the battle never take place, but where it didn’t take place was on ground which has not seen a modern battle.

We are all familiar with the “high ground” of Gettysburg, the bridges leading to Arnhem, and the beaches and hedgerows of Normandy, but some stretch of terrain on the border of the Czech Republic and Germany doesn’t have that infamy. When modelling a battle that actually took place, there was a house, a church tower, a farm, an Orchard, or a series of bridges, and the game just has to call these images to your mind. But what if it has to create that key crossroad out of whole cloth? It’s an intriguing proposition if it works, but also very difficult to pull off.

When playing the scenario, I based my plan on the assumption that the Soviet Army was a force that had spent itself defeating the Germans. This may or may not have been common knowledge at the time, but I suspect Patton would have made a similar assumption. I initially gave ground before each enemy attack until I had sufficient reinforcements available to make a stand.

The technique was extraordinarily effective. Whether it was in the design of the scenario, or just an artifact of playing against the computer*, I don’t know. I ended up with an overwhelming victory, which usually isn’t the case for me when playing TOAW.

Victory is all but achieved as I close in on Prague from the West and North. This is one of the more interesting sections of the map, with a major city, a major river, and lots of (now blown) bridges. The real fight, however, took place well to the west.

Not that it bothers me. Giving the opponent a good walloping can make for a satisfying experience. In fact, given the choice between an nearly-impossible-to-win scenario and a cake-walk, I’d probably prefer the latter.

Very similar map section from Google maps. You can see the similarities, but also the differences. Note in the game map, there is a river flowing West to East the is missing from the real imagery. I suspect that a river was the scenario designers best attempt at modeling the bridges, ravines, etc in the actual terrain. The fact that the “river” doesn’t exist takes away from immersion.

A modern-day photo of the road, down which I am about to launch my attack. Does the game map invoke the sense of the terrain that you see here? For me it does not.

However, the experience did fall flat for me. I suspect the problem with the scenario design was, as I alluded to above, one of no familiar features to provide the hook. The chrome. Not knowing my Czech geography, the map largely was a set of random features. Woods, roads, rivers, and towns were all represented, but provided no structure; no story.

The scale of the units also adds to the “generic” feel of the gameplay. The counters represent the regimental-scale subunits of a division. As the screenshot shows, I’m about to complete my encirclement of one of the last Soviet pockets, leading with the reserve combat command (CCR) of the 11th Armored Division. That unit has a mix of medium M4 and light M24 tanks, and a whole lot of halftracks. How well do these match up against the Soviet T34s? Who knows? Who cares? While all these factors are included in the combat calculations, in actual gameplay the details take a back seat to just getting units (any units) into position and winning through weight of numbers.

That’s a lot of tanks. I guess.

Yes, it “matters” that my division is split up across the map in that the combat factors are slightly degraded, but the loss of turns to try to reorganize would be a lot more costly than just absorbing that loss of efficiency. And this is realistic. It was not uncommon that battles were fought with whatever mix of units were available, independent of actual command structure. I’ll also guess that more than one attack ended up being spearheaded by the “reserve” command when circumstances made that expedient.

My point is that when all this can be ignored, it will be ignored. Then the only difference between this battle, a battle in Normandy, or the Bulge or near Kursk, becomes different coloring on the units. I come away from the game a little smug in the knowledge that George and I kicked some commie butt, but I gained no knowledge about how American Armor might have faced off against the great Guards Tank Armies of the USSR or how pitting Patton against Zukov might have actually played out.

At this point, I’m going to blame the scenario. It is a rather vanilla design, as far as the capabilities of the TOAW engine goes. There were no triggered political, weather or historical events (except some color commentary about goings-on elsewhere in the world.) I suspect the key to designing a scenario of this type is to put in a good amount of these kinds of extras to help drive a narrative.

Let’s see what happens the next time the U.S. meets the Soviets on a hypothetical Cold War battlefield.

(on to Part 2).
*Computer opponents in single player games are notoriously bad on the attack. I suspect the winning strategy for the Soviet side would be to take advantage of the initial superiority to defeat the waves of U.S. reinforcements piecemeal.